They've got a lot of company in North Jersey, where Tudor Revivals are one of the most striking historic home styles. Inspired by the homes of medieval and Renaissance England, Tudors combine wood timbers, stucco, brick, slate and stone into houses of dramatically angled rooflines and asymmetric shapes.

"It certainly ties you to medieval England. You have a 'Ye Olde' atmosphere," said T. Robins Brown, Bergen County's architectural historian and co-author of the book "The Architecture of Bergen County, N.J." (Rutgers University Press).

The 1920s were the Tudor Revival's heyday because many architects of that period learned about historic building styles in school and through European tours.

The 1920s also saw a huge development boom in North Jersey, when the area's first suburban towns — places like Englewood, Teaneck, Tenafly and Ridgewood — were being built. The two trends dovetailed to produce a large legacy of Tudor-style homes in the region, ranging from giant showplaces to middle-class cottages.

In fact, the New York suburbs have the greatest concentration of Tudor Revivals in the nation, according to the book "Tudor Style" by Lee Goff (Rizzoli). They also can be found in other affluent 1920s suburbs, including Lake Forest, Ill., and Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Not everyone loves Tudors. Some people find the interiors dark because the windows, often with diamond panes, tend to be on the small side. And others are turned off by their fanciful mix of building materials, said Deborah Snoonian, senior editor of This Old House magazine.

"There's a very particular flavor. Some people really love them, and other people think they're too busy," she said.

One of Tudors' most appealing features is their asymmetrical design, Brown said.

Anglophile's dream

"That allows you to have huge flexibility with the floor plans. You can put your rooms where you want to; you can have windows of different sizes and groupings," she said.

She said scholars believe Tudors became popular in the 1920s in part because building technology advanced to the point where the materials could be used decoratively, rather than structurally. The timbers and brick in a real medieval English cottage actually held up the house; in a 1920s Tudor, they're just on the facade.

Larry Robertson, Teaneck's historian, thinks that Tudors tap into Americans' love of British culture — even if their own families didn't exactly come over on the Mayflower. He points to street names like Westminster, Kensington and Trafalgar in the West Englewood section of Teaneck, which was developed in the 1920s and contains many Tudors.

"The idea was to make people buy into the Anglo-Saxon heritage," Robertson said.

Even if it wasn't actually their heritage?

"Especially if it wasn't their heritage," he said. "They can't change where their mom and dad came from, but they can live in an English-looking house on an English-named street."

Though Tudors share a number of elements, they're almost never cookie-cutter. The style allows architects to pick from a grab bag of design elements and materials, including brick, stone, stucco and half-timbering. Often the brickwork is in herringbone or other unexpected patterns and includes "clinker" bricks – misshapen or burned bricks protruding from the facade, adding a rough and rustic feel.

"There's complete freedom," said the architect Eugene Coleman, who has lived in a Tudor in Teaneck for 35 years. "There's turrets, there's slate roofs, there's different massing. It embraces a lot of materials. That's part of the interest. They're not just one material."

Remodeling challenge

The result can be a block like Teaneck's Standish Road, which offers one of the richest concentrations of Tudors in the area. The houses make up a unified streetscape — but are also varied enough to be visually arresting.